Ted Hughes has strongly influenced English-language poetry, especially in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. He is the poet of a nature that has been stripped bare, and in this damage, ritualised. Hughes's primal utterances, ripped from the bone, come out of loss. There is a lot of screaming in his poetry.

One of the problems with the 'translation' (Hughes's own word for his conversion of the notes of experience into poetry) is that in the effort to render the shocking into the language of song, an increasingly saturated language is sought. Hughes's technique is accumulation and pronouncement submerged in metaphor and simile. Animals here are more symbolic than 'real': the poet becomes the conduit to the imagined animal soul, and would convince us that he has a blood-link to the soul of the beast, for example in the 'Night Arrival of Sea-Trout' from River:

Honeysuckle hanging her fangs.Foxglove rearing her open belly.Dogrose touching the membrane

Hughes is at his best when considering what has been lost. His poems in Remains of Elmet are wonderful recountings of absence and the power of lost voices. An archaeologist, he unearths the layers of occupation and landscaping, where the traumas of intrusion and belonging are strongly in conflict:

Their schooldays were over.Peeping man was no part of their knowledge.So when a monkey god, a MartianTickled their underchins with his net rimThey snaked out and over the net rim easyBack into the oliogocene...

Change is at the core of Hughes's poetics. He evinces a desire for a purity, in a world that no matter how Thomas Hardy-ish, had its own technologies, and its own abuses of the land. But change can be positive and negative. Here Ovid has served Hughes well (Tales from Ovid, 1997). Transformation - change - so often a punishment, might produce 'A sleepy owl, hated by man':

And throwing it in the face of that babblerTransformed it to an owl's -A face all beak and huge eyes.

Hughes's work represents a nail in the coffin of Romanticism, a pushing of the sublime into the brutal. He created a brilliant pastoral that was old-world in taste but entirely new in its speech. One might look to this as the reason he was so suited to tackling a translation/interpretation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, to my mind his greatest achievement. Hughes would have looked to Ovid, and also the classical Greek dramatists, as his forebears, even if his sensibilities were formed by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British poetry.

Surprisingly, there's a remarkable sameness across his oeuvre. Hughes's many revisions alter only what is said and how - rarely the texture or tone. Some of Hughes's most interesting poems are found among those not published in volume form, but collected from journals. This book contains only published work - unpublished material and unpublished draft variations will have to wait for the Complete Poems. Some of the tonal shifts in the Birthday Letters might be more in evidence there. A variorum edition would also show us how these elegiac poems, purportedly written on the anniversaries of the birthday of Hughes's first wife, Sylvia Plath, were constructed, and whether the timescale was as claimed. These poems, regardless, are Hughes as open(ed) as you'll find him: confronting his present as much as his past. We learn more about Hughes here than about Plath:

The consistency of tone is also an editorial process: I am looking for what went on beyond this official version. Hughes often first published volumes privately, and some of his strongest work is in volumes that did not find their way into 'trade editions'. He was at his worst when official - as shown by his laureate poems.

The effort in this volume is to show Hughes's mastery over a lifetime, and to place him at the top of the first rank of poets. Whether he belongs there will depend on the tastes of the age, despite the uniqueness of his voice; it's so strongly the same voice across 50 years.